The following photograph of some wooden figures in front of a painting has appeared widely in the press.

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The Wall Street Journal had an intersting editorial about the painting in the background, probably from the Leader's palace. I found this fascinating:

On the one hand, a run-of-the-mill seascape, the kind of visual elevator music one finds in public spaces the world over, where the aim is to decorate but not offend. Yet there was something about the picture that wasn’t quite right and that kept drawing me back to it. For one thing, there was its vast internal scale. The waves were bigger, even, than the figures posing for the photograph, and they so dominated the foreground as if ready to break out and drown the assembled dignitaries.

Then there was the picture’s bizarre disunity. Two opposing visions of nature are combined, a benign one (the luminosity and fluttering birds), and an angry, violent one (the heaving seas and crashing waves). Just as strange, the painting’s various elements seem at war with each other. For instance, the rhythm of the breaking waves leads our eye from left to right, yet at the bottom right-hand corner—just to the right of the woman in the official party wearing a white jacket—a flock of birds, facing to the left, abruptly halts and reverses that momentum. A more accomplished artist would have found a way to integrate the various elements more harmoniously and lead our eye around the canvas more smoothly.

Then I realized: This is no ordinary painting but art with a purpose. What seem to our eye as limitations are the result of deliberate intent. It’s a piece of political propaganda. As such it belongs to a subspecies of kitsch known as totalitarian kitsch, where art’s sole raison d’etre is to bolster a dictatorial regime and glorify its leader.

The message of the painting, located in what appears to be the presidential palace, is a simple one: Kim Jong Il’s regime as a force of nature. The painting has a split personality because it aims to convey two distinct messages simultaneously: The soft light and gamboling birds conjure up thoughts of a natural paradise, an allusion to the “paradise” such regimes believe they are creating for their subjects. The crashing waves are a metaphor for the overwhelming power of the state and its Great Leader ready to crush all enemies.

This lead me on a search for more of Jong's beauty. Here is a birthday celebration involving tens of thousands of performers.

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The blog asserts that, "Former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, attended a Mass Games performance in 2000 stated that only a Communist dictator could get over 80 000 people to move together in perfect unison."

Be sure to visit the blog for more examples of the People's reverence fore their beloved Leader.

On September 28 the DailyNK reported that the notorious Penal Labour Colony 22 in country's northeast had been "totally shut down in June."

But the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) compared satellite images from May 2011 and October 2012 of the colony — 87 square miles of interconnected detention facilities surrounded by an electric fence and 1,000 guards armed with machine guns — and found that the only significant change seems to be the razing of several small buildings, one of which defectors identified as a detention and interrogation facility.

From HRNK's new report:

Nothing in the examined imagery supports the ... DailyNK reports that Camp 22 was shut down or abandoned. To the contrary, the level of activity and the state of the agricultural, industrial and civil infrastructure in the area strongly suggests that the camp remains operational.

The reports ends with a blue-print for disabling and dismantling the prison labor camp system. Camp 22 holds as many as 50,000 inmates, most of whom criticized the government

Google Reveals Detailed North Korean Map
Washington: Internet search giant Google has rolled out a detailed map of North Korea that even labels some of the isolated nation's remote and infamous gulags.

Users can zoom into the heart of Pyongyang and pull up photographs of the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, which houses the bodies of the revered former leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

Chart: Americans are more interested in North Korea than Beyonce or Obama right now

Pew estimates that 36 percent of Americans are following the news “very closely” – unusually high for an international news story.

The question is whether this is just a product of the sillier side of North Korea coverage – the bizarre propaganda and unintentionally goofy images out of the country – or if it reflects a larger evolution in how Americans think about the rogue nuclear state. If it’s the former, expect interest to die down when the Korean peninsula calms. If the latter, it will be interesting to see if those changing public attitudes bring any pressure for a change in U.S. policy.http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wor ... right-now/

Kim Jong-un's ex-lover 'executed by firing squad
Kim Jong-un's ex-girlfriend was among a dozen well-known North Korean performers who were executed by firing squad nine days ago, according to South Korean reports.The reports in South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper indicate that Hyon, a singer with the Unhasu Orchestra, was among those arrested on August 17 for violating domestic laws on pornography.
All 12 were machine-gunned three days later, with other members of North Korea's most famous pop groups and their immediate families forced to watch. The onlookers were then sent to prison camps, victims of the regime's assumption of guilt by association, the reports stated.
“They were executed with machine guns while the key members of the Unhasu Orchestra, Wangjaesan Light Band and Moranbong Band as well as the families of the victims looked on,” said a Chinese source reported in the newspaper.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... squad.html

Despite reports of him purging army generals and executing former girlfriends by firing squad, a survey carried out by the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University on 133 North Korean defectors found that 61.7 per cent believed he had the majority support of his people.

Although not strictly scientifically accurate, as it polls defectors rather than people currently living there, such a result makes him more popular than his father, Kim Jong-il, while it also compares favourably to Barack Obama, who is struggling at 41 per cent approval, and David Cameron, who scored 38 per cent.

The comments are somewhat entertaining. For example:Surely any North Korean leader would be failing without a 150% popularity rating!